Monday, October 22, 2018

A Look at Stars Without Number Revised Edition; Part 1

Captains Log: Stardate 96407.88

Just this last Friday I was preparing to write a review on Stars Withou Number Revised Edition by Kevin Crawford but when I got to the sector creation chapter I got really, really sidetracked. It took me about an hour to roll up my own sector and organize it into an excel spread sheet. Then I started looking around for a standard 8 by 10 hex sheet online and saw some unique ideas. This got my imagination going and I said screw it, I'm gonna make my own.

Here you can see my creation and use it for your own if desired. This 30 page pdf took me most of the weekend to create because I was also learning a new tool, Affinity Publisher. Now, I should mention that the document is not finished. For the most part it is complete but I still need to add layers for the map. That is one shortcomming of Affinity Publisher. Creating a layered pdf seems to not be an option.

Another option that I would have like to have seen is the ability to create text frames on a "Master" page and be able to edit each pages master text frame. Hopefully that makes sense. As an example, page 30 is the clean version of this master page. Pages 4-29 all have text in the upper right box that would have been much more simple to edit if the master page allowed a generic editable text frame on each page. This was the most tedious part of creating the document.

You might be asking yourself why is he talking about some publishing software. Thats because about a month ago I cancelled my subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud where I had access to all their tools. I now only have the photo suite of Adobe's tools. I was paying $50 a month to use 3 programs. Fuck that. Now I'm paying $10 a month and thats only because my wife needs Light Room. Otherwise I'd have canceled all of it. Now that I've found Affinity Serif, I'm looking at replacing photoshop with their version. It's a one time payment of $50 and you will still get updates to the software. Remember those 3 programs I said I use? Well, unfortunately Affinity Serif can only replace 2 of those for me at the moment. The last one that I need is a replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Anyway, back to the SWN sector map. I think I'm going to do this review in a slightly different manner. I'm going to look at the tools provided to the GM first. Then we will go back and look at the player options for the game. So obviously I'm going to start with the Sector Creation chapter. It's a really simple process and Kevin Crawford did an excellent job presenting it. The first step is to figure out how many star systems are in your sector. Roll a d10 and add it to 20. These are your star systems. I rolled a 6. Generally speaking each star system will have 1 major inhabited planet and that is all we are concerned with at this point. Next up we can roll d100 for two world tags and 2d6 for each of the remaing tags of atmosphere, temperature, biosphere, population, and tech level.EDIT: I almost forgot one crucial step. We need to figure out where the stars are located. Roll a d8 for the column and a d10 for the row for each star. When I did this I came up with 7 duplicates so I just re-rolled until I had 26 unique locations.

Each tag has a short description so lets take a look at one of the worlds I created. If you would open the bookmarks tab on my pdf you can then click on "0501 SESH". The first tag you see there is STAR TYPE. I'll get to that a little later. Next up is Atmosphere: Breathable mix. "Breathable mix atmospheres can support human life without additional equipment or gengineered modification. Any world that has a human population in the millions or more almost certainly has a breathable mix atmosphere."After that we have Biosphere: Human-miscible biosphere. "Human-miscible biospheres are those in which some substantial portion of the native life is biologically compatible with human nutritional needs. The local plants and animals may not be tasty or terribly nourishing, but they can support life without the serious importation of Terran crop seeds and livestock."Following that is Temperature: Variable Warm, with temperate places. "Variable temperature worlds tend to show a greater distribution of climates than other worlds, either ranging from cold to temperate levels or temperate to hot levels. This may be a climate that changes world-wide when a long, slow orbit brings the planet into proximity with a stellar primary, or it might be a world that has substantially different climatic zones spread across its surface. The north pole of one world might be a sun-blasted desert that moderates to a cool, wet equator, or an icy world might be warmed here and there by complex channels of geothermally-heated subsurface rivers. Variable temperature worlds tend to have savage weather. The mixing of hot and cold air can send ferocious cyclones and raging hurricanes across the surface of the world, some large enough to consume most of a hemisphere."

Moving on to Population: Outpost. "Outposts are rarely composed of more than a few hundred or few thousand colonists at the most. Outposts are either very new colonies that have not have the requisite time to grow or they are uncolonized worlds that just happen to have a naval or corporate base on the surface."Here we can also see the most common Tech Level: TL4; modern postech. "Tech level 4 worlds are the most common in human space, and their technical expertise is the baseline for modern post Silence “postech”. These worlds can create spike drives rated up to drive-3, fusion power plants, grav vehicles, simple energy weapons, and medicines that extend human life to a hundred years of vigorous good health. They can manage sophisticated gengineering on simple life forms, and some tech level 4 worlds have even attempted to improve the genetic structures of human life itself."

And of course my favorite part about Sesh, World Tags: Pleasure World of Beastmasters. Each of the world tags has a short description and some inspirational plot hooks. "Beastmasters: The natives have extremely close bonds with the local fauna, possibly having special means of communication and control through tech or gengineering. Local animal life plays a major role in their society, industry, or warfare, and new kinds of beasts may be bred to suit their purposes. Pleasure World: This world provides delights either rare or impermissible elsewhere. Matchless local beauty, stunningly gengineered natives, a wide variety of local drugs, carnal pleasures unacceptable on other worlds, or some other rare delight is readily available here. Most worlds are fully aware of the value of their offerings, and the prices they demand can be in credits or in less tangible recompense."

I really enjoyed making 26 worlds for this document but I needed slightly more. What kind of star did these worlds orbit? Seeing nothing in the book I decided to make my own 2d6 table for this.

Star Types roll 2d6

2

Binary Stars (roll
again to find out type)

3

Red Giant

4-5

Red Dwarf

6-8

Yellow Dwarf

9-10

White Star

11

Blue Giant

12

Variable Star (roll
again to find out type)

I'm almost done with sector creation now. Well, essentially I'm done. The only thing left is to fill in the details of each planet. As you can see on my pdf that I didn't fill in the bottom section. This is because I will fill it in as players explore those worlds. It makes more sense to me to do it this way. Perhaps the players will have some influence on details of these planets or other star system details. Within the Sector Creation chapter there is a section on Additional System Points of Interest. This will help flesh out the details of the individual star systems. It includes topics such as adding other worlds and other points of interest, as well as random tables for each topic.

Next time I'm going to take a look at Factions so stay tuned!

P.S. Please feel free to criticize and comment on the blog about the pdf. I would appreciate any feedback and suggestions. Also, please go over to John Polack's Mr. Mean Speaks Youtube channel. I hear he's going to do a new video on the game Faith 2.0 soon.